My mother had a job like this 30 years ago. She worked data entry as a keypunch operator. However, it was a full time job, above minimum wage, provided insurance and vacation time. Mechanical Turk relies on the race to the bottom, the fact that some people need any job to keep from being on the street. Of course companies love the gig economy, it keeps them from having to think of their workers as people.
Alternative interpretation: 30 years ago this kind of job could't easily be done by someone in a third world country for a fraction of the price. Now that it can, the price has adjusted.
Out of sight, out of mind. It's not like those people have the same standard of living but just with lower living costs.
You know a WHOLE LOT of people would rather make 500k a year than 300k even if it means their employees are damn near homeless and malnourished. See: any biz with min wage employees in the US.
Plus you're not bound by the same labor laws if you hire from overseas, only public outrage if the public ever finds out.
edit: that is to say, instead of thinking of it as "the price has adjusted", we can think of it as "greed is no longer constrained by the difficulty of overseas communication". Our laws can't contain greed, if we can just export it to where we have no jurisdiction.
> You know a WHOLE LOT of people would rather make 500k a year than 300k even if it means their employees are damn near homeless and malnourished. See: any biz with min wage employees in the US.
Nah, sorry. That's just over the top and not true. I worked two separate minimum wage jobs before I was 20, and both had owner / operators who made no where near that kind of money. One was an entrepreneur who was losing money every year, but believed he had a good product that could grow with franchises (and it did). The other ended up having his collection of businesses go under due to Netflix (they were video stores).
Minimum wage does not imply improperly priced labor. While it is not a living wage in much of the United States, to assume it is purely exploitive is also an overdramatized statement.
I'm not exceptionally well versed in minimum wage theory, so my opinions are based on listening to numerous Econtalk podcasts on the subject (https://goo.gl/IbKS1F). Some argue for an elimination of the minimum wage, others for a vast expansion at the federal level, others for a broader expansion at the state level.
My personal observation is that the minimum wage discussion is interesting, but mostly just the tip of the ice berg and serves as more of a distraction around more meaningful conversations.
1. Minimum wage accounts for less than 2% of the hourly workforce in the United States (https://goo.gl/Q9S2Mf). Looking at it on a state by state basis, that number increases; however, let's focus on the federal wage for now.
2. There are more than seven times more people in the United States (14M+) who are either unemployed (seeking but can't find work) or underemployed (have work, but are seeking more) :: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS13327709
3. There are over 60M Americans who work hourly jobs in the United States, and 4.6M will have to find new work each year due to regular turnover in the market (I don't have my citations handy for this one, have it in a document that is missing the citation, but I'm confident on the figure).
For a worker working 32 hours at the 8.25 minimum wage, they can expect to make $264 / week. Give them a 10% raise, and they're at $9.075, or $290.40 / week. Or, alternatively, let's give that worker better access to full employment, and they reach 40 hours, but only make $8.25 / hour, or $330 / week.
Given an average number of weeks of 52.1429 per year our example workers can expect to make:
Fully Employed Minimum Wage: $17,207.15
Under Employed Higher Wage: $15,142.29
In this very simple example (with some assumptions that are admittedly contrived), the fully employed minimum wage worker is in fact, better off. They are still impoverished, they still have a tough life and will not be able to have many luxuries; however, full employment, in this example, is more optimal when purely looking at salary.
Full employment, mixed with increasing wages, and decreasing prices of goods and services, is the combination we should all be striving for.
"Minimum wage does not imply improperly priced labor" even if it's not a living wage? If it's not a living wage, it's not proper, is it? What are you saying?
Have you read anything about the McDonalds and other franchises paying their employees in cards which carry transaction and withdrawal fees ON TOP OF the fact they're already making min wage?
Even if you make $10/hr which isn't min wage, and you're fully employed, you're still probably not breaking even with rent/food/car/insurance/medical, you'll be sharing a duplex with some other miserable bastard or living at home, or getting a subsidy from the government because apparently it's someone other than your employers job to see that you can afford to pay your rent!
Do you know that 40% of workers in America earn under $20K/yr? If your rent is $900/mo, then over half your income (haha we didn't even consider taxes yet) goes to rent, and you still haven't payed for power or food or anything.
You keep telling yourself it's fine not to pay people a fair wage, or that we should be struggling to lower prices or to employ people for more hours -- whatever you have to do to dance around the fact that we should be paying people a fair wage.
Every job I ever had before I started serious software as a freelancer paid fuck all ($10/hr or less, after 2000) regardless of how much the owner made. Many jobs, many different industries, same story -- and that's not anecdotal, this is happening to the entire country, see again the stat of how many Americans earn under 20K.
It's not like it's impossible to pay a living wage. I could go on and on with statistics about profit margins and wealth concentrating and everything -- we as a society are choosing to damn ourselves and our neighbors JUST IN CASE we ever happen to get rich ourselves, or we are already rich. We're greedy.
Do people on min. wage have to pay taxes? And how much?
Also, what is the total income of those who work min. wage? (So what are the other sources of income, or the monetary equivalent of regular support they receive?)
It's also fine to pay just a security guard and rent a machine that can make burgers and pay the franchise mothership delivery service a tiny bit more to not just unload the cargo but to load it into the burgermachine.
Yes, we ought to pay people a fair wage. People should look after people a lot better than we do today.
And please do, show us that the majority of those making under 20K/year work somewhere where the company is making huge profits _and_ that the work they do is AI-hard.
And of course we're greedy, just look how many people are still clinging to concepts such as nation, fate, hard work and so on.
I believe someone making minimum wage will get all of their Federal taxes back, so they could probably just claim 99 exemptions and never pay that money in the first place. I'm not sure about state taxes as that may well vary from place to place.
